Jared Olar: Journalism has, and needs, standards

“Three times is a threat,” to quote Gollum in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.”

Jared Olar

“Three times is a threat,” to quote Gollum in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.”

Recently three controversies erupted, one after another within or in relation to journalism. First came the “Journolist” scandal, which revealed, among other things, that certain members of a No Conservatives Allowed e-mail list of journalists and journalism professors had allowed their political opinions to override their objectivity. Blurring or erasing the line between “straight news” and advocacy is a serious transgression of journalistic standards.

On the heels of those revelations came the Shirley Sherrod fiasco, resulting from some dishonestly edited video clips that conservative activist Andrew Breitbart had uploaded to the Internet. The video clips, which someone had deliberately ripped out of context, made it appear that Sherrod, who is black and was an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, harbored racist attitudes about whites and had mistreated a white farmer who came to her for help.

A panicked NAACP hastily denounced Sherrod, and the USDA pressured Sherrod to resign … and then the fraud in which Breitbart was complicit (whether knowingly or unknowingly) was exposed. Wiping a bit of egg off its face, the Obama administration apologized to Sherrod and offered her another job.

Breitbart is not, and does not call himself, a journalist. Rather, he has, in the words of the left-handed compliment offered by James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, “only the inexpensive integrity of a rascal who is honest about what he is.” Nevertheless, even as a political operative, he still had the moral obligation to confirm the authenticity and accuracy of the Sherrod video clips before deciding to use them in a political maneuver.

Then along came the irresponsible (if not malicious) online publication of 92,000 top secret military reports from the Afghanistan war. The reports were uploaded to the WikiLeaks website, an operation of Julian Assange, a native of Australia who claims to be a journalist and has dubbed himself “editor-in-chief” of WikiLeaks.

It’s more accurate to say that Assange is a convicted cyber-vandal who bills himself as a whistleblower and poses as a journalist. A little hint for the “editor-in-chief” of WikiLeaks: legitimate journalists normally attend, rather than schedule and present, press conferences. Journalists are supposed to gather and report the news, not create events and call the news media to have them report on it.

He justifies his actions, which will harm our war effort and endanger the Afghans named in the documents who have helped our troops, by claiming that there might be evidence of war crimes in the documents. Certainly after the disgrace of Abu Ghraib and other shameful incidents in our recent history, concerns about war crimes in Afghanistan are understandable — but Assange should have confirmed his purported suspicions of war crimes before deciding to cooperate with an American traitor and giving the murderous Taliban the mailing addresses of the families of our Afghan friends.

These three episodes shed light on the perennial challenges and dilemmas of journalism: how to decide what stories to write, and when and how to write them; how to maintain journalistic objectivity and avoid bias; or what to do when a confidential source provides sensitive material that they really shouldn’t be sharing. After all, “freedom of speech” and “freedom of the press” were never meant and have never been understood as a free pass to say anything anywhere at anytime about anyone or anything for any reason.

Over the years, journalism developed professional standards to safeguard the honesty and integrity of the news. Sadly, commitment to those standards seems to have weakened in many quarters. This isn’t just the fault of the rise of talk radio, cable news or the political blogosphere. One need only recall Jayson Blair, who plagiarized and fabricated stories while working for the New York Times, or think of Dan Rather’s career-ending “Memogate.” Then we have the so-called “accountability journalism” of the Associated Press, in which editorialization and reporter bias is thinly disguised as “news analysis.”

Professional journalism is not and has never been without its flaws and weaknesses, but at the end of the day a press that is both free and honest is essential to modern life. We all suffer when journalistic standards are ignored or subverted.

Jared Olar may be reached at jolar@pekintimes.com. The views expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the newspaper.